21 Things I’ve learned on Crack(ed.com)

I have wondered if Cracked.com is called Cracked because, like crack, it’s addictive. (Note: I can only personally confirm cracked.com. Their website receives a billion hits a year (thanks, Wikipedia!). Part of what’s so addictive is that you frequently learn something mind-blowing. The humor just acts like grease to keep the wheels of addiction turning.

Here are just a few things I’ve discovered via their articles, with links….

Big auto killed electric public transportation. More: around 1920 (in the USA), electric trains and trollies could be found in towns across America, and accounted for 90% of trips taken in vehicles. Cars were too expensive, you didn’t have to learn to drive this way or pay for gas. Here’s where the fun starts: GM and a bunch of other car and oil companies teamed up, formed ‘fake rail companies’ as fronts, and bought the railways from all the small companies that owned them, replacing 900 of 1200 public railway systems by the mid 1950s. GM was fined eventually but the fine was nothing to the profits made due to this.

Article Unknown

Free spirit spheres – in Vancouver, CA, you can stay in a sleeping-unit (what else to call it?) that hangs from the trees. Also, it’s a sphere. And wooden. I’m going to stay there someday. You can see pics at freespiritspheres.com

sketch – sketch is a a restauarant/bar in London. It looks like a freaking awesome place to go. I’m going to visit their bathroom someday. I know that sounds weird, but their bathrooms are made of egg (shapes). Still not making sense, right?… just read the article linked to above. I don’t know how to describe it.

Archimedes created a ship-capturing system of crane-like wooden arms with hooks at the ends. They would basically grab the Roman ships and hoist them out of the water. The enemy ships would then be dropped and capsized.

Wingsuit flying. Cooler and trickier than skydiving. (See this point-of-view video on Youtube – y2u.be/7bJmVJZbmIk – You will shit your pants. At the annoying music, if nothing else.) I’m going to do this someday.

Ezekiel raised a zombie army in the Bible. Geez, if people taught this stuff (along with 6 raunchiest, most depraved sex acts mentioned in the Bible, another cracked article), I may have been willing to suspend my disbelief… until age 12 or so, anyway. Here’s a funny excerpt of the article:

Unlike Moses and Aaron, Elijah and Elisha didn’t have those ridiculous “staff” things holding them back. These guys were basically plugged into The Matrix here, and could do anything they wanted whether the laws of physics were cool with it or not.

Someone just built a medieval castle in Kansas…. because why not? He says passersby often mistake it for a real medieval castle before realizing that doesn’t make sense. Especially because (if you’re close enough) you can see the stone pathway up to the castle is emblazoned with math equations (dude’s a math teacher, who just built a castle in his spare time… what, what do you do in your spare time?)

There is a single counter-counter-enclave in the world: namely, an Indian town, in Bangladesh, in India, in Bangladesh. No shit. Sucks for the people in India-in-Bangladesh, and in-Bangladesh-in-India-in-Bangladesh, and… I give up… it sucks because their governments can’t provide for them, so some of them still live in Stone-Age conditions.

There is a town in Belgium-no wait, the Netherlands-no wait… sigh. There is a town that is completely scrambled. Like completely, with some parts belonging to one country, some in the other. The trippiest part is a photo of a restaurant with a border splitting it in two, one side marked NL for Netherlands, the other B for Belgium. I am going to visit this town someday.